JASI'AKY 18, 190C. 



The Weekly Florists^ Review* 



549 



House of Begonia Gloire de Lorraine at Samuel Murray's^ Kansas City, Mo. 



SUCCESS WITH LORRAINES. 



The accompanying illustration is from 

 a photograph taken just before Christ- 

 mas at the greenhouses of Samuel Mur- 

 ray, at Kansas City. It shows the house 

 of Gloire de Lorraine begonia from 

 which he took the exhibit for the Kan- 

 sas City show which attracted so much 

 favorable comment from all trade vis- 

 itors. Many visited the greenhouses for 

 the purpose of inspecting the balance 

 of the stock. They were pleased and 

 surprised to find that practically every 

 plant in the lot was up to exhibition 

 standard; there were no poor ones. The 

 picture shows the stock just after the 

 plants for the Christmas display had 

 been picked out. 



DARLINGTON ON CALIFORNL^. 



[A paper by E. B. Darlington, trial ground 

 superintendent for W. Atlee Burpee & Co., read 

 before the Florists' Club of Philadelphia, Jan- 

 uary 2, 1906.] 



In complying with the request of cer- 

 tain members of your club, that I should 

 give you a short talk on a trip which I 

 had occasion to make to California the 

 past fall, in the interests of the seed firm 

 with which I have the honor of being 

 connected, I would state that the period 

 of this visit was the latter part of Sep- 

 tember and the early part of October, 

 at which time nearly all the harvests had 

 been gathered and the growers were 

 awaiting the advent of the winter rains 

 to commence plowing and planting the 

 crops for the ensuing year. 



A Dry Season. 



In the section visited, which comprised 

 the coast-line from San Francisco to Los 

 Angeles and the higher land in the 

 vicinity of Sacramento, there had been 

 no rain since the previous spring; the 

 hills and mountains were gray and bare, 

 excepting for the small brush and oc- 



casional carpet of dried burr clover, 

 while over the trees and roadside weeds 

 was a thick coating of finely powdered 

 dust. Excepting on occasional small 

 lawns and parks which were kept fre- 

 quently watered, nature had completed 

 her work for the season and was enjoy- 

 ing a period of rest before starting in 

 to produce another crop. But the 

 climate was fully in evidence everywhere 

 and its possibilities were a source of con- 

 tinual wonder to the gardener from the 

 east and impressed itself on one at every 

 hand, not only to see the growth of 

 palms and greenhouse plants in the open 

 air, but also in the changed appearance 

 of our own familiar crops of fruits. The 

 real estate boomers and people of the 

 towns hold forth on the subject of 

 climate with the greatest enthusiasm, 

 but the gardeners and seedsmen whom I 

 had the pleasure of meeting passed over 

 all this as a matter of course and con- 

 fined themselves to showing their various 

 crops and the natural points of interest 

 in their immediate vicinity and all were 

 true gardeners in extending the hand of 

 fellowship and hospitality. 



Cut Flower Stores. 



My time was extremely limited and 

 was so fully occupied in visiting the 

 ranches of the seed growers that I did 

 not visit any distinctively florists ' places, 

 nor did I notice any such on the out- 

 skirts of the cities, but they must have 

 a number of such places, as the flower 

 stores in the cities evidenced. These 

 stores were quite in the eastern style, 

 though not nearly as numerous. At the 

 time of my visit the flower stores in Los 

 Angeles and San Francisco had good 

 displays of chrysanthemums, which at 

 that time were selling for $2..50 per dozen 

 at wholesale in San Francisco, but aside 

 from the chrysanthemums, the flowers 

 displayed were not as fine as the prod- 



ucts of the greenhouses in our own 

 city. JS^o doubt this is largely due to the 

 lack of a demand for fine flowers at that 

 time, as it was between seasons, as there 

 should be no difficulty in producing as 

 fine roses and finer carnations than we 

 have if there should be a sufficient de- 

 mand for them. The only drawback is 

 the high cost of coal, but this could 

 probably be obviated by the use of oil^ 

 wliich is almost exclusively burned for 

 the production of power. 



Santa Clara Valley. 



Leaving San Francisco the morning 

 after my arrival, my first stop was in 

 the famed Santa Clara valley, a tract 

 of level land from three to ten miles 

 wide lying between two ranges of brown 

 hills. The soil is black and heavy, much 

 of it in the central portion being adobe, 

 or dried swamp land, divided by large 

 open drainage ditches, while the higher 

 portions were of a lighter color and 

 texture. The soil is free from stones 

 and consists of loam or earth which has 

 washed down from the hills through 

 countless ages. The higher, lighter- 

 colored ground had much the appearance 

 of our own soils, but in the lower ground 

 the black adobe has the appearance of 

 the muck found in the bottom of an 

 old pond, in the dry season this black 

 earth becomes extremely hard and large 

 cracks radiate over the surface in every 

 direction. Even where it is kept con- 

 stantly cultivated, the small particles of 

 soil resemble gravel in their hardness. 



Such flowers as late crops of sweet 

 peas, asters, etc., as well as beds of 

 young celery, carrots and endives were 

 growing vigorously under the influence 

 of irrigation and did not seem to mind 

 either the hardness of the soil or the 

 intense heat which prevailed during the 

 middle of the day. Hoeing to keep the 

 surface soil loose and fine is unknown 



